Earlier this year, I acquired our family Panasonic camcorder from the ‘90s. This camera ran tape for many Christmases, birthdays, basketball games, a school project for a French class, and at least one wedding before eventually becoming obsolete when my dad bought a digital camcorder in the early 2000s. It sat in obscurity and sealed away in a bag for about 20 years before finally making the pilgrimage to my house. Having a fondness for retro tech, especially the stuff I personally grew up using, I purchased new batteries for it and started bringing it along to special occasions (as is tradition for this device).

I also bought a converter that would allow me to offload the contents of the tapes to a thumb drive to save to my computer. Spurring tradition and in an effort to cleanly archive my recordings, I taped over previous events on the same VHS-C in an effort to avoid amassing a library of tapes I’d never watch twice.

Anyway, it’s been a blast bringing it to parties where other Millennials and Gen-Xers enjoy reacting to this very familiar yet ancient piece of technology—a true one-two punch of nostalgia and novelty. After the immediate delight of seeing it aimed their way passes, people will instinctively fall into the distinctive camcorder etiquette of smiling and waving directly into camera as they would’ve years ago. As such, every tape has an evocative tone to it that smartphone videos often lack.

I took it to a recent party at Travis and Allie’s house and we recorded a silly 90s-inspired intro to a sitcom that doesn’t exist called “Tiki Nite” that shares a skeleton with the intro to Full House. We had fun making it, and I had an even better time putting it together piece by piece.